Wednesday, January 30, 2013

This past weekend I had a group over to play tournament poker and afterwards started a live game.

I am trying to have one home game every month where we can all get together and play some tournament poker, and then see if anyone wants to sit and play a .05-.10 NL live cash game. The last time I did this we had one table and we played almost four hours. It was fun and we played with a max buy in of $5. This time I opened it up for any amount.

The tournament started at 6:30 and we had eighteen players. I set the tournament up with T$5,000 in chips and 15 minute rounds. I wanted to make sure the levels were good and everyone could put in enough time to play. The tournament ended up going three hours with the final four chopping the prize pool. I was very happy with the results.

I was also able to get a live game going before the tournament ended. Once the tournament players got to the final table the other table was then set up for live and away we went. There were eight players going and when the players started busting out of the tournament they wanted to play live as well. When the group chopped the prize pool that opened the second table and we had two live tables running. The live game went about 3 hours before players started getting tired and decided to call it a night.

It looks like I will need to build a third table to keep up with the amount of players that want to play in this game. I enjoy putting the games together and watching everyone have fun.

I will play again on Thursday evening in a Pub that has a weekly game going. They are looking for dealers for their game and I might do that to keep up my skills in dealing. I don’t plan on looking for a job again as a dealer but doing this on the side would be fun.

Friday, January 25, 2013

The only poker I have played in the last week has been on the computer. I am playing a .01-.02 NL game and trying to build up from the $5 that is on there.
I have been working the percentage theory to see if it really is true. I see all kinds of cards and if I get premium hands, I am not going to win even if I do the raising, and try to get someone off of their hand. I basically wait till the percentage of wins equals the 10% mark and then I wait to see who has been winning hands and will try to play against that person. So, now it is not so much what cards I have but when to play them.
I am not sure I like this style of play but if it works then I will keep doing the same thing. I have never heard of anyone working this in their strategy and it would be interesting to see if anyone can see the same thing I do. Right now it seems to be working.
So far I am down .97 cents but the last session I had I moved up $1.03 so not bad in 34 hands. I was trying to play at least 100 hands per session but now that I am trying to grow this bankroll I will take the money and run and then wait till the next session. It also depends on the players as well. If you get a lot of new players coming in you have to be careful of the equity rule as well.
I am setting up a Home Game this weekend and will have a group playing a tournament and then afterwards we will play some live .05-.10 NL. It should be fun. We played in December and had a good group of players here and we played till one in the morning. This time I am going to stop the game at midnight because it just got to be late cleaning up the house.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

A few years ago when playing online poker was somewhat “legal” I was playing on Pokerstars and Fulltilt. I look back now and those were fun years when the opportunity to build a bankroll was good. Now I am left trying to make it happen in the casino’s here in my area and once in a while being able to travel to a bigger casino and play in their games.
It was before the “Black Friday” event that I would be playing a tournament online and would find myself being knocked out of the tournament by an inferior hand. It was common for me to lose hands that I thought should have won and I could never figure out why it would happen.
During my time playing online poker I had made friends that lived in other parts of the United States. We would email back and forth and discuss hands and we would talk some strategy.
One day I received an email about a booklet that was discussing something that we found interesting. This booklet was describing how to win at online poker and how the computer programs operated. It mentioned the term Random Number Generator (RNG) and how it worked. Now this was interesting, since I figured all computers would be able to do the big calculations and put out the required amount of possible hands. I learned that this is not possible unless you have a big government computer. At least it would have to be big.
From there the booklet got more interesting to me because then it started talking about the Net Win Percentage (NWP) and the Overall Win Percentage (OWP). I really started to get interested in this information. This also meant, to me, that playing poker live in the casinos is definitely different than playing online.
My friends and I decided that we would try out this new information for ourselves and see if it would really work. We made sure we had the proper NWP when hands were played and we also threw hands away that, even though would be premium hands, would allow our OWP to be in a certain percentage. This also meant we had to keep an eye on all the players at the table. By letting someone win then we were allowing our percentage to drop and prepare us to play hands that would maximize our chip stack.
What we found with this knowledge was that we were able to approach this online poker game at a different level and play the percentages more than playing the cards. Remember I said that we didn’t get very far with this because of the “Black Friday” event but I wonder if this is still appropriate. Have things changed in the computer industry that this is no longer working and more combinations of hands are available?
When I picked up the booklet the other day it brought back some memories and made me go back and read it again. I must say I miss playing live online poker.

I have not been very impressed where I have moved my blog too. I am going to revive this one and just put my poker related stories on here. I will use the other one for different stuff. Just could not take it any more.